In the world context, the demise of the Soviet Union also meant an incalculable loss. It meant the disappearance of a counterweight to colonialism and imperialism. It meant the eclipse of a model of how newly freed nations could harmonize different ethnic constituents and develop themselves without mortgaging their futures to the United States or Western Europe. By 1991, the leading non-capitalist country in the world, the main support of national liberation movements and socialist governments like Cuba, had fallen apart. No amount of rationalization could escape this fact and the setback it represented for socialist and peoples’ struggles.
Even more important than appreciating what was lost in the Soviet collapse is the effort to understand it. How great an impact this event will have depends in part on how its causes come to be understood. In the Great Anti-Communist Celebration of the early 1990s, the triumphant right hammered several ideas into the consciousness of millions: the Soviet socialism as a planned economic system did not work and could not bring abundance, because it was an accident, an experiment born in violence and sustained by coercion, an aberration doomed by its defiance of human nature and its incompatibility with democracy. The Soviet Union ended because a society ruled by the working class is a delusion; there is no post-capitalist order.
Some people on the left, typically those of social democratic views, drew conclusions that were similar, if less extreme, than those on the right. They believed that Soviet socialism was flawed in some fundamental and irreparable way, that the flaws were “systemic,” rooted in a lack of democracy and over-centralization of the economy. The social democrats did not conclude that socialism in the future is doomed, but they did conclude that the Soviet collapse deprived Marxism-Leninism of much of its authority and that a future socialism must be built on a completely different basis than the Soviet form. For them, Gorbachev’s reforms were not wrong, just too late.
Obviously, if such claims are true, the future of Marxist-Leninist theory, socialism and anti-capitalist struggle must be very different from what Marxists forecast before 1985. If Marxist-Leninist theory failed the Soviet leaders who presided over the debacle, Marxist theory was mostly wrong and must be abandoned. Past efforts to build socialism held no lessons for the future. Those who oppose global capitalism must realize history is not on their side and settle for piecemeal, partial reform. Clearly, these were the lessons the triumphant right wanted everyone to draw.
Our investigation was motivated by the enormity of the collapse’s implications. We were skeptical of the triumphant right, but prepared to follow the facts wherever they led. We were mindful that previous socialist partisans had to analyze huge defeats of the working class. In The Civil War in France, Karl Marx analyzed the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. Twenty years later Frederick Engels expanded upon his analysis in an introduction to Marx’s work on the Commune.7 Vladimir Lenin and his generation had to account for the failed Russian revolution of 1905 and the failure of Western European revolutions to materialize in 1918-22. Later Marxists, like Edward Boorstein, had to analyze the failure of the Chilean revolution in 1973.8 Such analyses showed that sympathy with the defeated did not bar the pursuit of tough questions about the reasons for the defeat.
Within the overarching question of why the Soviet Union collapsed, other questions arose: What was the state of Soviet society when perestroika began? Was the Soviet Union facing a crisis in 1985? What problems was Gorbachev’s perestroika supposed to address? Were there viable alternatives to the reform course chosen by Gorbachev? What forces favored and what forces opposed the reform path leading to capitalism? Once Gorbachev’s reform started producing economic disaster and national disintegration, why did Gorbachev not change course, or why did the other leaders of the Communist Party not replace him? Why was Soviet socialism seemingly so fragile? Why did the working class apparently do so little to defend socialism? Why did the leaders so underestimate nationalist separatism? Why did socialism—at least in some form—manage to survive in China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba, while in the Soviet Union, where it was ostensibly more rooted and developed, it failed to last? Was the Soviet demise inevitable?
This last question was pivotal. Whether socialism has a future depends on whether what transpired in the Soviet Union was inevitable or avoidable. Certainly, it was possible to imagine an explanation that differed from the inevitability trumpeted by the right. Take, for example, the following thought experiment. Suppose the Soviet Union had fallen apart because a nuclear attack by the United States had destroyed its government and devastated its cities and industries. Some might still conclude that the Cold War was over and capitalism had won, but no one could reasonably argue that this event proved that Marx was wrong, or that left to its own devices, socialism was unworkable. In other words, if Soviet socialism came to an end mainly because of externalities, such as foreign military threats or subversion, one might conclude that this fate did not compromise Marxism as a theory and socialism as a viable system.
In another example, some have asserted that the Soviet Union unraveled because of “human error” rather than “systemic weaknesses.” In other words, mediocre leaders and poor decisions brought down a basically sound system. If true, this explanation like the former would preserve the integrity of Marxist theory and socialist viability. In actuality, however, this idea has not served as an explanation or even the beginning of an explanation but rather as a reason to avoid a searching explanation. As an acquaintance said, “The Soviet Communists screwed up, but we will do better.” To have any plausibility, however, this explanation needed to answer important questions: what made the leaders mediocre and the decisions poor? Why did the system produce such leaders and how could they get away with making poor decisions? Did viable alternatives exist to the ones chosen? What lessons are to be drawn?
Questioning the inevitability of the Soviet demise is a risky business. The British historian, E. H. Carr, warned that questioning the inevitability of any historical event can lead to a parlor game of speculation on “the might-have-beens of history.” The historians’ job was to explain what happened, not to let “their imagination run riot on all the more agreeable things that might have happened.” Carr acknowledged, however, that while explaining why one course was chosen over another, historians quite appropriately discuss the “alternative courses available.”9 Similarly, British historian Eric Hobsbawm argued that not all “counter-factual” speculation is the same. Some thinking about historical options falls into the category of “imagination run riot,” which a serious historian should rule out. Such is the case of musing about outcomes that were never in the historical cards, such as whether czarist Russia would have evolved into a liberal democracy without the Russian Revolution or whether the South would have eliminated slavery without the Civil War. Some counter-factual speculation, however, when it hews closely to the historical facts and real possibilities, serves a useful purpose. Where real alternative courses of action existed, they can show the contingency of what actually did occur. Coincidentally, Hobsbawm gave a relevant example from recent Soviet history. Hobsbawm quoted a former CIA director as saying, “I believe that if [Soviet leader, Yuri] Andropov had been fifteen years younger when he took power in 1982, we would still have a Soviet Union with us.” On this, Hobsbawm remarked, “I don’t like to agree with CIA chiefs, but this seems to me to be entirely plausible.”10 We too think this is plausible, and we discuss the reasons in the next chapter.